The batanga was meant to be the next Cuban dance craze. Bebo Valdés, the Cuban pianist, bandleader, composer and arranger, premiered it at the Tropicana cabaret in 1952, sure that its blend of Afro-Cuban sacred rhythms and big-band swing would take over the floor. He was wrong. Within months, the cha-cha-cha created by Enrique Jorrín swept through Havana and pushed the batanga aside. That failure could have defined him. Instead, it became the first of many times Valdés bet on a sound before the world was ready. He was born on October 9, 1918.
That failure could have defined him. Instead, it became the first of many times Valdés bet on a sound before the world was ready.
From Quivicán to the big bands
Valdés was born on 9 October 1918 in the village of Quivicán near Havana, and he grew into a central figure of the golden age of Cuban music. By the late 1940s and 1950s he was helping adapt the mambo for big bands, taking Afro-Cuban sacred rhythms and weaving them into popular dance music. He was one of the founders of Latin jazz, though nobody used that phrase yet. When the batanga lost its battle with the cha-cha-cha, he did not retreat. He kept working, recording and arranging, always pushing Cuban music toward something more complex.
That same year, 1952, brought a different kind of opportunity. Valdés took part in sessions organised by the American producer Norman Granz, and one of the recordings became the famous improvisation 'Con poco coco'. The track showed what Valdés could do when the structure loosened: long, daring piano lines over a rhythm section that never let go. It was a glimpse of the musician he would become decades later, when the world finally caught up. But first he had to leave everything behind.
Exile in Stockholm
In 1960 Valdés emigrated from Cuba to Mexico with the vocalist Rolando Laserie. He then lived briefly in the United States, toured Europe and eventually settled in Stockholm. He never returned to Cuba. He promised to go back only after the fall of the Castro regime, because he could not stand dictatorships. Cuban media still called him a great Cuban artist, despite his hostility to the authorities. For more than thirty years he worked far from the island that had shaped his sound, teaching Cuban music and Latin jazz in Sweden while his name faded from the international stage.
The revival began in 1994, when Valdés collaborated with the saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera on the album Bebo Rides Again. It was a reintroduction, but not yet a triumph. That came in 2000, when Fernando Trueba's film Calle 54 brought Valdés's piano playing to a wide audience. The film also marked his first collaboration with his old friend Cachao. Suddenly, a musician who had been a legend in Havana in the 1950s was being discovered by listeners who had never heard of the batanga or 'Con poco coco'.
The late-career run was remarkable. In 2003 Valdés and the Spanish flamenco singer Diego El Cigala recorded Lágrimas Negras, an album that combined Cuban rhythms with flamenco vocals. It won a Grammy and became one of the most talked-about crossover records of its time. Valdés collected seven Grammys in all, including two for the album Bebo de Cuba in 2006. He was no longer a forgotten exile. He was the living link between Cuba's golden age and a new generation of Latin jazz.
Valdés spent his final years in Benalmádena, in the Spanish province of Málaga, where he had lived since 2007. He suffered from Alzheimer's disease for several years and died in Stockholm on 22 March 2013 at the age of 94. He never saw Cuba again. But the boy from Quivicán who invented a dance that lost to the cha-cha-cha had already won a bigger prize: he had outlasted every trend, every exile and every silence, and his music finally crossed every border he could not.